Category Archives: In Poor Taste

I want to try something with you. A sort of meditation, if you’re willing to indulge me. I want you to breath deep. Loosen your shoulders. Calm your mind. Exhale. And pretend, for just a moment, that you’ve never heard of Jurassic Park.

Have you done it? Is your head clear? Has the franchise as a whole been erased from your brain? Ok, good.

We’re calm, cool, and collected, and we’re pretending Jurassic Park/World doesn’t exist in our reality. Now, I’m going to try to sell you an action film, and you have to pretend it’s for adults and their families. NOT exclusively written for elementary school children.

That’s right. Be calm. Like Dr. Grant before the talking dinosaur. Not after.Continue reading →

Pacific Rim 2 is a bad movie. There’s a hollow love triangle between Eastwood, Boyega, and a talking mop stand, which is only really addressed during a lengthy ice cream eating scene. There’s also a brief waft of tension as the teenage genius tries to integrate with a squad of adult Jaeger cadets, which feels pretty high-school. But otherwise the writing, dialogue, and story are all matchsticks holding up the giant robot action figures and Godzilla monsters, who revel more in property damage than actual fisticuffs.

In the opening narration Boyega, playing a character who lives off the scrapheap slums of dead Jaegers, tells us that the smaller Pacific nations have suffered complete financial collapse–unable to survive the crippling debt caused by excessive damage from prior battles. Then in the first fight scene we see Gypsy Danger *ahem* Gypsy Avenger, piloted by Boyega, using a tractor whip to pull skyscrapers over. Which proves to be about as dangerous to the enemy as a falling stack of popcorn buckets. It seems our protagonist forgot about infrastructure pretty quickly…But I digress.

No, the real gold to be mined from this movie happens in the background, creeping behind the action like a plot-tease. Quietly. Subtly. Sometimes in a single throw-away line of dialogue. And those are the little glimpses into the lore that we’ll be focusing on. Those tiny glimmers of actual story–those are the hidden movies we’ll be discussing, and how three little details would have made better movies than what became Pacific Rim 2. Continue reading →

I’m petty. Inexplicably, incurably, impossibly petty. And I have a website. Which is why I’m using this public platform to roast my roommate who cracked a handful of short, harmless “You so trashy!” jokes in my direction. Because you know what they say; “Sticks and stones may break my bones but I will push the nuclear button with zero regard to measured responses.”

In case you’re wondering, I’m also delivering these in-person. Without warning. Surrounded by friends. Under the rouse of having a dude’s game night. Accompanied by the music provided.

Play on loop for full effect.

You’re so trashy, you were awarded a trophy for waste management when you moved from the fridge to the chair.

For years I’ve been using a mashup image of car spoilers to indicate when an article itself contains plot spoilers. Haha. Very humorous. Wordplay is fun. But for this post I mean it. Really.

This post contains plot spoilers!

Both types of spoilers will be present in this article. So if you don’t like having an entire franchise spoiled for you, or if the notion of Road-Bros getting totally sick traction on the concrete upsets you, turn back now.

Or just, you know, leave anyway so you can live a meaningful life without dumb fan theories wasting your time…

Over the last few months I’ve been getting updates from wordpress showing an uptick in traffic on this blog. More followers. More hits. More links. More likes. Which is seriously weird since I’ve been gone for almost a year–during which this blog should have tanked harder than the Third Reich. Strange, no?

By the way I’m going to be pretty explicit in this post, so if four-letter words offend your sensibilities go back to reading Family Circus.

Oh, I’ve also been pranking my co-workers by using our networked terminals to look up copious amounts of CPR dummies on Amazon so they get targeted ads for open-mouthed monstrosities. But I’ll get to that later.

Anyway, I took a year away from writing online. The reason was twofold… Continue reading →

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out during a very influential time in my life. I was young enough for the neighbors to laugh at my yarn-and-sapling bow making skills, yet old enough to get in trouble for threatening to cut out their hearts with a spoon.

Less intimidating when it’s a 7-year-old.

So it’s no surprise that I was a bit too immature to grasp the deeper story behind a movie like this. As a child I was so wrapped up in the sword fighting, the bow shooting, and the Morgan Freeman-ing, that I missed the important lessons hiding just under the skin. Lessons like how to choose your allies. Why safety nets for the lower classes are important. And why constructing an Ewok village is never a solution.

No matter how long you stare, tiny dancing bears will never appear.

Re-watch this movie as an adult, however, with a fair working knowledge of class systems and medieval politics, and another story emerges. The classic “Steal from the rich and give to the poor.” goes out the window. You start to realize that Prince of Thieves is more of a “Drive a political campaign that legitimizes your status as a pretender by using the suffering poor.” kind of jam.

Don’t believe me? Here are a few reasons why the Sheriff and Robin are both imposters trying to fill a power vacuum by exploiting the peasantry. Continue reading →